Yr 12 Parents Forum: ALIS data West Island School November 2012

ALIS Advanced Level Information System Run by Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring @ Durham University. 29 years worth of data. 1.3 Million Students in CEM system About 10K students per year doing IB, mainly international schools and UK independent schools.

Basic Principles of ALIS Data Measure Student’s ability Intake Profiles IPR - Strengths and Weaknesses, provides valuable information to support teaching and learning of individual students. Project future performance from national trends Chances Charts, target setting and subsequent monitoring. We do not use to predict future grades for University or IB predictors. Compare actual performance to Projected Performance Value-Added Reports. Used to assess performance of our school.

ALIS : CABT Testing Assessed by a computer adaptive test that takes 1 hour Measures developed ability rather than taught curriculum No preparation is required for the test Components are vocabulary (words and phrases) maths (numeracy) non-verbal (spatial/3d) School and students’ test performances are compared to students around the word.

Computer adaptive? Questions get harder when a the student answers a question correctly, vice versa

Vocabulary Vocab - Closely related to reading and English – a proxy – pupils need to be able communicate ideas across the curriculum areas Vocab is caught not taught – absorbed from the world around us. On its own is an excellent predictor for later academic achievement. Contributes well to the prediction of English History Foreign Languages Choose word or phrase with most similar meaning from those shown on right. How is vocab relevant to my subject? 6

Maths x/4 + 2 And a hard question – could you do this? Seems tricky – especially for 11 year olds! However 1 in 15 pupils are getting this right! Good maths skills will mean that any areas of the curriculum that require numeracy - the pupil to think logically, perform calculations, reading data Maths – here’s an item of medium difficulty. Good predictor of Maths# Stats ICT D&T Economics 7

Non-Verbal: Cross-sections Non verbal – 3D visualisation, spatial awareness, pattern recognition. NV consists of 3 sections – crss sections, block counting, pictures. A low score here will mean that students will struggle will any elements of the curriculum that needs them to be able to think in 3 dimensions – for example geography, Art Drama Maths Science D & T Solid been cut with plane to form a cross section. 8

Non-Verbal: Blocks 2 Piles of blocks number of small and large blocks 9

Non-Verbal: Pictures Pictures – addition, subtraction, sequences of pictures. Low scores in Non verbal – anecdotally number of times PH has been told on INSET that low NV corresponds to observed problems in D&T. 10

C B D A Bands, percentiles, standardised scores… Standardised scores Standardised to include: 25% of students in each band 50% between 90-110 Mean score 100 C B D A Standardised scores Percentiles: 10 5 20 30 1 40 90 95 80 70 99 60 50

Intake profile for current Year 12 at WIS

Example IPRs: Average WIS student

Example IPR: low non verbal

Example IPR: high maths and NV -future Engineer or Architect?

Example IPR: relatively high non-verbal

Example IPR: relatively low maths

Example IPR: reletively low non-verbal

Example IPR: gifted student

Regression curves from past results used to make predictions for future results

Regression Curves for HL Subjects: it is ‘easier’ to get a higher grade in some subjects

Sample Chances Charts The following charts show the percentage of students, who achieved the same baseline score as your children, went on to score a particular grade at IB. It is not meant to predict what grade your children will achieve, but is an indication of how previous students of similar ability performed in that subject. Two baselines are used. (LHS) Average GCSE score, (RHS) ALIS (CABT) test score. The black line shows the average score achieved by students of similar ability, this is shown as ‘predictions points’ in the table at the top Note: GCSE grades are converted into numbers A*=8, A=7, B=6, etc.

GCSE predictions similar to CABT test predictions – as expected

GCSE predictions above CABT test predictions – hard working student ?

GCSE predictions below CABT test predictions – underperformed at GCSE?